The Rough
by Black-Death
Summary: Sometimes...diamonds can be found in the rough. (Companion piece to "The Diamond")


The Rough  
  
"Boy! Come here you insolent little ass, before I skin your hide again!"  
  
It was Vernon, of course. Screaming his voice hoarse as always.  
  
Harry sighed in frustration and the long-suffering obedience of one who knew they were trapped. It was another, mind-numbingly chore some and aggravating-beyond-belief day in the Dursley household.  
  
He snatched up the dusting rag he had been using lastly, expecting to get more grief over the fact that his chores were not finished yet.  
  
Unfortunately, he was sluggish today, though that wasn't anywhere near HIS fault . Vernon Dursley was an over-bearing, tyrannous boar. Not to mention "Lazy- Sow Extraordinaire."  
  
The old bastard had kept him up the previous night, giving the basement the most thorough scrub-down it had likely ever seen. It had all been for Dudley. The pestilent little shit who was turning it into his new 'bedroom.'  
  
Bedroom? Hell, bedroom was the word used to define the place of sleep for a human being. Naturally consisting of a bed, desk, closet, a few close possessions, and if you were lucky, sometimes a bathroom.  
  
Not Dudley. No, never anything simple for Petunia's little "Dudeykins."  
  
The 'room' if you could really even call it that, which he resided in, was more of a damn warehouse than bedroom.  
  
Toys scattered and strewn chaotically from one corner to the next, were something of a peril. To be avoided at all costs if you wanted to escape without a possible concussion. And clothes? One couldn't really even imagine the utter hopelessness of the situation. Just suffice to say that asphyxiation was on the list of "high" potentials for health hazards. The walk-in closet was so dense a stranger could very easily mistake it for a jungle of exotic, overgrown foliage.  
  
Not that he was envious or anything, mind.  
  
It was just tha-  
  
"You mangy git! When I say COME, you move boy! How many times do I have to drill that into your thick, pig-headed skull?!"  
  
//However many times it will take for YOU to realize that I've heard this lecture about as many days as their are in the average life-span.//  
  
Harry mentally criticized, though he wisely kept his mouth shut.  
  
Instead, he attempted to look resigned to the idea and in turn, shorten his uncle's verbal abuse with the most pleading of looks he could muster.  
  
Vernon was eyeing him accusingly, and not without the regular suspicion. The liver spots on his upper forehead pulsing in time with the thick blood vessel that always declared obviously enough when his relative was livid with anger.  
  
The Boy Who Lived shook his head ruefully, shuffling his feet in faint apprehension.  
  
He hated it when the elder Dursley was in one of his fits. Sure, he never had exactly been a merry-ray of sunshine throughout Harry's rather meager, hellish existence, but these moods of his were always bad.  
  
They meant that Vernon had it in for Harry.  
  
He peered down at the floor meekly, seeking refuge from his nasty relative's menacing glare of disapproval and disgust.  
  
The boy loathed how his uncle could do that. Make him feel like the vilest of scum with a simple look. And It was even more damaging to his ego to know that his own blood actually and TRULY believed that of him.  
  
They thought he was filth.  
  
Not good enough for the fleas to bite.  
  
It tore his soul in two  
  
And he despised them for it.  
  
"Look at me when I'm talking to you, whelp. I said your not getting away with leaving your chores for your poor aunt to do again. How terribly difficult is it to clean windows and patch the rooftop? I told you to do it yesterday, for pity's sake! And I was being NICE then you cheap-money- grubbing rat. I'm tired of being your meal ticket, and your mad mother's damned idea of a philanthropist! You're either gonna earn your keep here, or your out! I MEAN it! YOU. ARE. OUT!!!!!!!!"  
  
Vernon trembled with fury. His face a bright, glistening red orb of sweat. His breath coming in heaving gusts of air, fast and ragged from his outburst, fleshy lips trembling with the task of taking in oxygen.  
  
The Boy Who Lived was attempting his best to look frayed to his nerve- endings. Hoping desperately that the domineering visage before him would not know that this 'decree' of his had gone half unheard. He was so used to such being thrown in his general direction, that it barely even caught at his heart anymore.  
  
Barely.  
  
He was a sensitive child by nature, and would always feel that niggling of self-reproach and inner torment in the deeper recesses of his heart, despite his attempted ridding of it years ago. He now had come to accept it in its entirety and incompletion.  
  
But he only allowed a small amount of pain within himself to be acknowledged this time. Only a minute bit of suffering to break to the surface.  
  
There were always far more malignant things to be had from Vernon Dursley.  
  
Especially when Harry wasn't able to fool him.  
  
The vicious smile that the boy had been expecting for sometime now crept to the surface of the elder Dursley's bloated face. Trickles of sweat skating down his brow, teeth glinting in the dying light offered by his small window in the cupboard.  
  
"So you think this is funny, do you LAD? I'm so positively alight with humor that my nose is glowing? HA! I'll show you to snicker and taunt your betters!"  
  
A maniacal glitter struck his clouded, earth-tinted eyes; the inner wild man cut all ties of morality and value, which now receded, depicting the savagery and bestial quality of the hunter herding in the hunted.  
  
The boy new to resist was futile. He had already tried it to many times to not understand that by now. It would only reign greater harm down upon his head if he did.  
  
Vernon rushed at Harry. As though the boy were a gladiator in a Roman coliseum of bloodshed and morbid amusements, the lion charging the naked and shaken 'warrior.'  
  
And the lion closing in, KNOWING that it would not go to sleep hungry that night.  
  
He dealt a lumbering fist into Harry's stomach, innards curling in panic and shock, Harry gasped, his lungs scrambling to function once more.  
  
But before that succeeded a lingering, cracking blow was branded into his jaw, sending him skidding across the hard wooden floorboards into the mortar of the underside of the stair-wall.  
  
The mad thing grabbed the boy's listless form and pushed him harshly into the side of the architecture, his meaty arms not straining in the least as he dragged the near-incoherent boy's face upward, fingers bruisingly gripping tender flesh at the underside of Harry's jaw where he had been hit.  
  
Harry did not cry out.  
  
Spittle was spat unceremoniously into his gaunt face as the crazed, glassy eyes of the animal drunk on rage screamed at The Boy Who Lived in primal fury:  
  
"You son-of-a-bitching little fuck! I should do the world a favor and rid myself of at least ONE of YOUR kind. Vile piece of shit that you are!!!!!!!! Your mother was a whore I always said she was. Your father was a bastard, evil and the most soiled of all those dirty FUCKERS!!!!!! Your no better, your their ilk. Just the same diluted blood runs through your veins!!!!!!!! Blood of the evil, the fowl, the wretched, the WICKED!!!!!!!!!! You f-fucking PARASITE!!!!!! Sick fuck, you FUCK, YOU DESEASE, FUCKING DESEASE THAT DESTROYS ALL THAT IS GOOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"  
  
Harry distinctly remembered in his hazy dreams later that week, that it was his head colliding with the unforgiving stone of the wall that was making that sickening crunching sound.  
  
And then, abruptly as it had begun, his universe of pain ended.  
  
All he could see was Vernon, the edges of his vision already darkening as he stared, hallucinating through slit eyes as his uncle became calm.  
  
Almost peacefully so.  
  
It's incredible and stupefying how the insane have that ability, the ability to achieve complete and total serenity after such a rage.  
  
Harry would have to remind himself to laugh when he woke...or would he remember to do even that? //Would his befuddled mind recall ANYTHING?//  
  
The wild thing was now dead, or dormant at least. Sleeping beneath the layers of propriety and virtue that the balding, bulbous form of his relative adorned himself with, only to divest him of them again when the thing was roaring to be freed.  
  
Then almost in a reverent whisper, as one would when conversing with their deity, rather than the battered and broken form of a young adult lying at their feet he stated:  
  
"I should like you very much to clean up this mess when you're done, Harry."  
  
And with that, he left. Also retreating into the disquiet silence of the dark as The Boy Who Lived thoughts were about to as well.  
  
Harry didn't realize that Vernon had been talking about the trail of blood marring the wall.  
  
***  
  
His hands had always been calloused.  
  
The boy didn't recollect a time when they weren't.  
  
Though he knew that they had to have been when he was young.  
  
When he was very small, and still had the world at his fingertips, along with the love of parents who had wanted and needed him.  
  
Yes, he knew they HAD to have been, but could he believe it? Believe that for a time in his life, he had been beautiful too?  
  
Like the rest of his body, they were used and worn. Sullied with the labor most souls weren't subjected to in their childhood, some their whole lives.  
  
He was exhausted and torn.  
  
He was rough.  
  
No, he couldn't.  
  
***  
  
The reunion at Hogwarts was quickly approaching thank gods. And for one boy EXISTING, if not LIVING at the Dursley' in Number 4, Privet Drive, it was a herald from the Heavens.  
  
Ron had owled him, explaining the absurd and ridiculous stunts the twins had been testing out during the summer at the burrow, and exclaiming his excitement for their coming Sixth year.  
  
If Harry had been reachable at all, he would have said that the tension was contagious in Ron Weasley's letter.  
  
But he was not.  
  
He had still yet to receive a message from Hermione when he lay down that night, dreaming and weeping for all that he was, was not, and would never become.  
  
To hell with it all, he would turn his back on it, on everything.  
  
And as that night came the sun set on Harry's grieving heart forever.  
  
***  
  
  
  
Diamond In The Rough  
  
Shawn Colvin - John Leventhal  
  
As a little girl I came down to the water  
  
With a little stone in my hand  
  
It would shimmer and sing  
  
And we knew everything  
  
As a little girl I came down  
  
  
  
But in a little while I got steeped in authority  
  
Heaven only knows what went wrong  
  
There is nothing so cruel than  
  
to bury that jewel  
  
When it was mine all along  
  
I'm gonna find it  
  
  
  
You're shining I can see you  
  
You're smiling that's enough  
  
I'm holding on to you  
  
Like a diamond in the rough  
  
  
  
Every now and then  
  
I can see that I'm getting somewhere  
  
Where I have to go is so deep  
  
I was angry back then and you  
  
know I still am  
  
I have lost too much sleep  
  
But I'm gonna find it  
  
  
  
You're shining I can see you  
  
You're smiling that's enough  
  
I'm holding on to you  
  
Like a diamond in the rough  
  
Like a diamond in the rough  
  
  
  
In my dreams I go down by the water  
  
With a little girl in my arms  
  
And we shimmer and sing  
  
And we know everything  
  
In my dreams I go down  
  
  
  
You're shining I can see you  
  
You're smiling that's enough  
  
I'm holding on to you  
  
Like a diamond in the rough  
  
Like a diamond in the rough  
  
*** 


End file.
